Game Of Thrones Executive Producer Says Final Season Will Flip The Story ‘On Its Head’

Beth Elderkin

The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones is so close we can almost taste the winter — even if HBO hasn’t yet announced a premiere date. In the meantime, we’ve got some intriguing thoughts from a Game of Thrones producer on what we can expect from the coming long night.

Following that briefest of three-second teasers, Entertainment Weekly has shared a new photo from the set of Game of Thrones, giving us a new look at the couple at the centre of Westeros and reminding us that, oh yeah, Jon Snow and Dany are totally incest-boning now.

Of course, HBO is being super hush-hush about what’s coming in what is arguably one of the most-hyped final seasons in a television show’s history. But co-executive producer Bryan Cogman did share a brief synopsis of what we can expect from our beloved heroes and non-zombie villains, and it sounds like it’s something worth waiting for.

Here’s Cogman’s quote:

It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death… It’s an incredibly emotional haunting bittersweet final season and I think it honours very much what [George R.R. Martin] set out to do, which is flipping this kind of story on its head.

Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington also discussed how shooting this final season has taken much longer than previous ones — it was a 10-month shoot for a six-episode season and each episode cost around $US15 ($21) million to make. This is not only to make sure that the final season stands out, but also because it’s the last one the cast and crew will ever do for Game of Thrones.

“Every choice, every conversation, every attitude, has this air of ‘This is it.’ Everything feels more intense,” Clarke said.